Category Archives: Studio Artist

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This is a fun image for the holiday!! Hope you enjoy!! Â You will hear more tomorrow and hopefully have an image for 2 Things Challenge! Â Marcella, thank you for asking what program I used for these images. Â Studio Artist is a wicked fun program that swirls things all around very easily … and sometimes it feels out of control. Â But it is lots of fun! Â Here is a post with a demo of how it works if you are interested. Â Thank you!

Sometimes I have so much fun making new creations – this is one of those times … This again looks like a pattern for fabric or something … very lovely to me! This is using Studio Artists on an image that I have usage rights to (one of the so-called royalty-free images). Â I worked with an image and then changed the hue in Photoshop. Â It does definitely look textile to me. Â What do you think? Â What so you see?

Now for something I don’t think you’ve seen before. This came out of playing around with Studio Artist – a very fun computer art program. I had so much fun transforming a beautiful bird image into a horse of a different color. Hmmm … I bet Pet Monologues might think this could be an appropriate animal image for them. You are seeing this image because a friend wanted some of my ACEOs. She went through all my galleries and this is one of the ones she choose to want to have. Neither the Fanciful Animal Images or the bubblescapes are in those galleries. I need to make bubblescape galleries and the animals have their own galleries. I am delighted that such a fantastic artist wants my work – I will ask her if I can share one of her pieces with you sometime and point you to her website and Etsy shop.

The AWE (Artists Window Exhibit) Project is in just over a week. I have to get going on printing, matting and framing my work to be exhibited. Luckily Susan is fantastic at helping me with such things. (Particularly the framing which is the hardest for me). I need to take some steps to get that going or else I will be in trouble in a week. Please wish me luck!

Today I am feeling more connected to the Universe energetically – whew!! I feel like my body is made of light and energy (which we all are). To me this is a great indication that I have taken another step in healing!! Thank you for all your support, kindness and healing.

One thing that has been great for me in blogging is getting back into creating paintings again. I had gone on quite a digital image binge a couple of years ago and then slowed way down (except for animal pictures). I have not done that much new painting with traditional materials except for working on a couple of series that I knew I wanted to work out to four in each series. And I have spent a lot of time marketing and doing graphic design and web design for clients.

Coming here and having you want a new painting every day, I worried if I would have enough. I am sure I had enough for maybe a year (or 2 depending on what I use), but I am very conservative in a certain way (not politically), and I didn’t want to use up all my paintings.

So I started creating new digital ones to hopefully delight you. And it has been great – because you have helped me go past what I was doing before in working with Studio Artist. In Photoshop I am probably working very much similarly. But your comments have pushed me past where I was working with SA. To a bunch more steps and taking images and working and reworking and reworking again.

Then – about the names – you pushed me to get more creative when I was going on and on with the Beyonds – since I was working with the same base image. That was how I was naming before – using one name for all 4 or so images I would make from one source image.

Right now I have over 300 images in a folder from one painting. Almost all the images I have created the last couple of months have been from the one base painting. So, obviously, Beyond 301 doesn’t cut it.

The Confession – for my Blog Action Day painting, I want to use traditional mediums – which means physical paints, physical collages, physical pastels, etc. Now … here is the confession really – I am scared! I feel I can never do anything worthwhile and that it just won’t look that good … and I can’t do it. I am nervous to so this!

The Appreciation – I want to thank you all for helping me develop into another stage in digital painting and also naming of paintings. Having to come up with a new name every day has made it much easier to be creative in names.

It is delightful that we are talking with each other about these issues of creativity and supporting each other as artists. For me, it is much different doing things digitally than with paper or canvas and paint. Lately I have been sitting down with an image and just saying – “go ahead and change it.”

First, actually I cruise a bunch of images and see who speaks to me. Someone jumps out and yells, “me, me me!” So I say, “OK.” I don’t have anything in mind … I work from the process before me with the Studio Artist program. That is how I have made most of these images lately … and often gone into Photoshop for while too.

It is much scarier for me with paper and paint. Though I used a similar technique for using paper and tempera for awhile and 2 of those images are very popular ones of mine. With paint I feel I have to create something “special” to justify using resources and stuff .. so it is much harder to create.

Also, with paint and paper or canvas, sometimes I do sit down with a specific idea – like to create another image in a series. Allowing myself to play obviously works much better. And I absolutely agree with Sue – don’t worry too much about being original.

Start with something that you want to do and constantly stretch yourself. Hard as it is, try to compare yourself to you – not to anyone else. Though that is easier to say than to do!Â I know!Â What else are you thinking?

Rima Koleilat has issued another challenge for anyone to play the game of changing an image. Details are here. So I have taken up playing this game too. Here is my first image – with a tip of the hat to Aldous Huxley (who wrote “Doors of Perception”).

Part of the game is sharing how you got from the original (see Rima’s post) to the final image. I decided to start out in Studio Artist. As before, I started with Translating the image – which moves it in the direction you pull and then doubles as one moves. Because I wanted to keep a sense of realism, while adding mystery and a sense of otherworldliness at the same time, I only pulled in one direction at a time.

After pulling left to right horizontally, I Translated downward vertically. I wanted to continue this process but as I tried it, I was losing the main elements of the image that I wanted to keep. So I used Scale Uniform to just make everything smaller to give me room to fool around.

Then I Translated from right to left to double the door and and Translated from top to bottom to add to the upper stories. After that, I Translated from bottom to top to double the shop and doors to deepen the sense of mystery established with the doubled sign on the shop awning.

I wanted to differentiate the bottom shop and doors from the top to make it look like a reflection. I made a selection in Studio Artist to choose just the bottom reflections and was struck by the striking nature of the inverse color that showed up as I was highlighting it.

I couldn’t figure out how to make things work from there in Studio Artist so I switched to Photoshop since I know certain things much better in that program. Again, I choose just the bottom reflection and tried a few things like watercolor filters and such. But that inverse color was stuck in my mind. So I did a simple inverting the color in the reflection part.

There is an article that I have written about “Art that Changed Me” – it is the topic of the current and next issue of the People’s Voice which is a local newsletter of which I am the editor. There wasn’t room for me in the current issue so we are going to run the topic again. It is now quarterly – it used to be monthly and was way too much work! In that article, I talk about how the reflective surfaces of the bathroom window sills and bathtub walls of my childhood impacted my perception and expanded my viewpoint. This image reminds me of the mirroring wall quality.

Colors on computer are so complex and just plain weird. Tonight I have used this image in 4 different programs. I created the image in Studio Artist, added an adjustment layer in Adobe Photoshop to change the hue, looked at this and several other versions in Adobe Bridge and then finally working on this post in Firefox.

The reddish/orange hue in the Bridge looked very very orange and extremely elegant! Then when I was resizing it in Photoshop, all of a sudden it looks much pinker than orange. Hence the name “coral.”

I remember looking at a post in Lisa Call’s quilting blog and she was writing about being very distressed because the color didn’t come out right on a photograph she was putting on the web. I think I must have had 2 browsers open – Firefox and also Safari – probably to look at the image and post in one browser and comment in the other. The color difference was amazing – like 2 different pieces. So I am not going to be in too much angst right now over this color difference.

In the comments to this post a few days ago Chris made an anoucement about changes he is going to make in his art marketing blog.Â You might want to check out these comments and definitely check out his blog as he makes these changes.Â I will point you to his blog as he does make this change.

I am going through my email box today to try to deal with stuff or file it away. It is boiling hot and sticky. But I am making progress. I just signed up with My Space to be able to download a file on how to effectively use My Space. I can’t figure out much yet, but here is the adress …. I know it will shock you … http://myspace.com/dianeclancy. One step at a time for learning these new things!

I have been working the last couple of days on making the pdf file for the Studio Artist Demo. I naively thought I could just copy and paste it from the post to a pdf file. Many hours later, I know think it is not so simple.

I asked for help on the technical details from the local Hidden-Tech group and the number of responses and suggestions has been amazing! It is a local email (probably offline group too) of people working in small businesses for ourselves. I think almost (if not all) everyone is in the Creative Economy. It is so great the way people help each other. I know when a question whizzes by my eye that I think I can answer, I jump right in there to be part of the solutions. Very cool what we are all doing to help each other in this new interconnected world.

Of course, after I get this ready, then I need to figure out how to use the newsletter function at my host. All the marketing advice talks about giving away something in exchange for someone’s email address. I think I am going to have a nice product to give away.

Here are my current entries for Rima’s challenge. You can see the deatils of the challenge on her blog on this post. You can also see some other people’s entries in the posts after this one. here is the original image to work on. You can see more details on how to use Studio Artist on this post on my blog.

Lily Pad

This painting is done in Studio Artist using warp translate and rotate tools quite a few times.

Then it became time to try a different method. I decided to move to Photoshop and see what to do there … I actually made “Night Light Lily” before I made this painting. This is an exclusion layer over the Night Light Lily. I copied the layer several times and the top layer is exclusion mode is on the top.

This is the Studio Artist demo that some of you have been asking me to create. This is a 22 step creation of a digital painting in Studio Artist to show you a demonstration of how to use this innovative art program. I have decided to use the same size images I usually use. I want to give you a better flow than I think you will get from going back and forth between thumbnails and enlargements. But for the workspace and the final image I am providing the thumbnails so you can look at the enlargement if you want. Of course any of the other enlargements are available on request. This is what the workspace looks like. Here is a screen shot of the program after I have already done some steps so you can see which part of the workspace is the source image and which is the canvas. Studio Artist always has a source image, but there are many ways to use this source image including use of the colors, the image to manipulate and not at all. Workspace I am putting in a thumbnail that you can look at full size in case you want to see more of a closeup of the controls of the program. This is the identical image but it will blow up larger. I use the acrylic painting â€œFire and Airâ€ (that I have been using for the series of digital paintings in posts the last couple of weeks) for the …[CLICK TO READ MORE]